Barbara Haislip for the Wall Street Journal: Few industries are more daunting for entrepreneurs these days than clean energy.
Developing the technology and hardware is expensive, and setbacks are common. Even if all goes well, getting a product to market can take a decade or more. Most venture-fund investors, meanwhile, want a quicker payout.
Danielle Fong, co-founder and chief scientist of LightSail Energy, is trying to keep investors happy while working toward some ambitious clean-energy goals. Her company’s aim, she says, “is to produce the world’s cleanest and most economical energy-storage system” through a technology that uses compressed air to store energy from the grid. LightSail’s technology will do this more efficiently than other solutions, Ms. Fong says, by capturing some of the excess heat that comes when compressing air. “Until now, this was wasted, reducing efficiency,” she says.
Founded in 2009, Berkeley, Calif.-based LightSail has raised $70 million from several investors, including Bill Gates, Peter Thiel,Khosla Ventures and the French energy giant Total. Cont'd...

There is no denying to the fact that initiatives are good, but they have been happening in smaller fragments and over large intervals of time. Therefore, it calls for more investment into research and development into the fuel cell sector.

A significant issue for wind may well be maintaining its price competitiveness vis-a-vis solar as the PTC amount goes down over the next five years while the ITC used by solar will remain at 30% through 2020

By David Shaffer for Star Tribune: The least-expensive battery to store energy from the electric power grid may be sitting in homeowners’ basements — the electric water heater.
That is the surprising finding of research released Wednesday by the cooperative power industry, including Maple Grove-based Great River Energy, and an environmental group.
Customers at many utilities already save money by heating water at night, taking advantage of low, off-peak electric rates. It requires a special electric water heater that holds a day’s worth of household water, but offers long-term savings.
Now, a study by the Brattle Group, an economic consulting firm, says that the nation’s 50 million residential electric water heaters can address bigger challenges on the power grid, such as storing intermittent renewable energy from wind farms and solar arrays. Cont'd...

The popularity of electric cars in the UK has shot up over the last few years, with around 50,000 plug-in vehicles on the road, compared with just 3,500 in 2013. This huge increase in electric cars in 2015 has augmented because of a shift in the public's approach towards electric cars and a persistently refining public recharging network.

SGIP stands for Self Generation Incentive Program, a way to motivate consumers to use alternative energy sources to generate and store their own electricity. The SGIP pays energy storage users over a dollar per watt.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution means providing a personalised energy experience for the consumers, prosumers and utility companies. Consumers and prosumers want to see their impact on their bill, the grid and the environment - and they want to be accountable for their energy choices.

Daniel Oberhaus for Motherboard: The world, it seems, is falling in love with solar energy. Recent years have seen the increasing adoption of solar power around the world as an alternative energy source for everything from individual homes to the entire energy grid, with the United States’solar capacity having grown to 24 GW, a more than a 17-fold increase since 2008. Part of this rapid growth for solar infrastructure is the result of markedly more efficient solar energy cells, but in spite of these recent technological advances, transitioning to solar power still doesn’t make sense (at least economically speaking) everywhere.
Installing photovoltaic systems can be pretty pricey, and home- and business-owners have to engage in a complex cost-benefit analysis to see if transitioning to solar power is an economically sound idea. The “pain-in-the-ass” factor of such calculations alone might be enough to turn people off of the idea of contemplating installing a photovoltaic system, so the folks at MIT came up with a solution: Mapdwell.
Mapdwell maps the solar potential of entire cities by doing a cost-benefit analysis for every rooftop to determine if installing solar panels on that rooftop is worth the investment. All you do is enter your address into the program, and it will tell you the expected installation costs, the number of years it will take to earn back this investment from your photovoltaic system, the amount of carbon offset by the installation, as well as incredibly detailed installment specs such as the optimal panel tilt and the number of panels that could fit on the roof. Cont'd...

Featured Product

FischTank Marketing and Public Relations provides communications and marketing services to both start-up and established renewable energy companies. We provide media relations, content writing, digital/social media, and other marketing support to companies working in sectors spanning solar, LED lighting, energy storage, hydrogen, battery development and manufacturing, alternative fuels, and more. Our clients have been featured in top tier media including print, online and broadcast.